New Open Source Services Coming Online

I read this post on Matt Asay’s Blog this weekend on a new company called SourceKibitzer that collects metrics on about 60 popular open source projects written in Java.

This is great news for open source users, as there appears to be more services coming online that aim to make it easier for open source users to find, evaluate and produce open source software.

I would be curious to see what folks think of SourceKibitzer’s relatively deep metrics, as we have made the trade off to pursue more projects across more languages with fewer metrics. Also, I would be interested in whether our users would like to see their private projects indexed in the same way that we index open source projects.

On a slightly different note Matt writes:
“What I don’t understand is why the company doesn’t simply sniff out Java projects on Sourceforge and do the analysis on a proactive basis.”

The thing is, as we found out here at Ohloh, many of the most popular open source projects in Java (and this holds true for other languages) were developed on other forges or they were migrated off SourceForge.net long ago. We collected project metrics from SourceForge only to find that many of the projects were dead or had been moved. That’s why it’s a challenge to be comprehensive in scope, i.e. because many important open source projects are not on SourceForge.net.